John Harrington-WHAT WE USE - Sandbags

Here's a video segment on the Sandbag kit that we use. A transcription of the video is available after the jump.

Hands on instructional video on photography from Assignment Construct.

Transcript:
Hi, I’m John Harrington and we’re going to break out and break down the wide variety of equipment we use to deliver images to our clients. Next we are going to show you one of the equipment kits we use when we are traveling on assignment. Each kit is different and has a very specific purpose. So lets take a look.

A critical and often overlooked component on shoots is a sand bag. As silly as it sounds, sand bags are really important. These sand bags are designed to sit on the bottom of the stands so equipment doesn’t fall over and cause damage to a head, fall on the subject, or otherwise do damage on set. They are of varying weights.

These are old school Matthews sandbags. These two are twenty-pound bags. This is a fourteen pounds sand bag, however because this is a true sand bag, this is actually the newer technology Boa bags. It’s got bibs of some sort in it that are much heavier and much more dense.

So even though this is fourteen pounds and this is fourteen pounds, it is much smaller so you would always want to go with one of these over the older school technology. We also have a couple of nine pound sand bags for smaller stands. In addition and something that is worthwhile when traveling, are these sand bags. These are actually bags that are empty that when you get to your location you can fill up with sand so you are not paying for the weight of traveling with sand.

These bags will open up, and then inside the bag you can actually slip sand in and it will actually wrap around and hook onto the bag. And this Velcro will wrap and make sure that this sand bag stays up right so the sand doesn’t fall out, something else you don’t want to have happen.
So let me show you how these sand bags actually go onto a stand. There’s a couple of different ways to do it. Here’s a standard C-stand base. So you can take the sand bag, and you can just lay it over the leg. That certainly works for a lot of functions. One of the things you can also do for extra security is to take the strap and run it over the top of this, so that once the vertical pole is in the base of the C- stand.

The bag can’t come off at all. That makes a little bit of a challenge, if you need to reposition the stand and you already have the head and the pole in. That’s where the new technology bag comes in. In this case, you have the bag, and the bag itself has a little rubber grip inside and you can actually wrap the bag around and it’s now sturdy. It’s closer to the center. It’s just a much better wrap on something as simple as a C-stand or a stand bag.

I know it sounds silly to talk about new technology sand bag and old technology sand bag but in this case these bags are just much better than these bags. You can also take this and wrap. This is a smaller one. You can wrap it around like this. That works as well. There are multiple ways to do that. You can even if you really got to do something, and weigh something down, take and put one on each end. And add a third one to this leg, and really further move out the center of gravity, and how these bags grip onto a stand.

So that’s a little bit about sand bags and how they are a critical component when you’re on a shoot or on location, especially when you are outdoors.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

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The Assignment Construct is a commentary about what went into, what went on behind-the-scenes, or otherwise occured before, during, or after an assignment. Everything from images of the setup, to choices of camera angle, client requests (and fulfillment), and so on.